Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Twenty-Two Very Inconvenient Truths Prove the IPCC is Wrong about Climate Alarm

WUWT has published today an essay detailing "22 very inconvenient truths" & reasons not to believe the dire climate predictions of the IPCC, written by Jean-Pierre Bardinet and originally published in the French magazine Contrepoints.

Truth n° 16: The trace gases absorb the radiation from the surface and radiate at the temperature of the air, which is at some
height, most of the time slightly lower that of the surface. The trace-gases cannot "heat the surface", according to the second
principle of thermodynamics which prohibits heat transfer from a cooler body to a warmer body.[Poitou&Bréon rebuttal] Thisisanotherbigstupidity.Doestheauthordenytheexistenceofthegreenhouseeffect?It'saphysical
phenomenon well understood since several centuries! Such statements should immediately strip their author of any credibility for
readers who know some science. If the author was correctly using the second principle of the thermodynamics he would have seen
that it is indeed the surface that delivers heat to the emissive trace gases, which are also the absorbing gases. Those gases prevent
the surface from loosing some of the heat brought by the sunTo send the heretic to the stake Poitou & Bréon charge him of atheism, of "denying the existence of the greenhouse effect". That
kind of argument has been used since almost two millennia "All men, except a few very ones who are very depraved and vicious,
believe in the dogmas and myths of my community, which have been revealed centuries ago; hence my dogmas are true and my
prophecies are undisputable"."Since several centuries" is likely to refer to Fourier whose memoir of 1824 does not say anything on a "greenhouse effect" 60 (see
also card n°1) or to Arrhenius whose tentative explanation of glaciations61 and de-glaciations by a radiative effect of the CO2 has
been proved wrong (a) because in ice cores the CO2 content follows the temperature by some centuries and (b) because redoing his
computations with the correct absorption spectra gives a warming of 0.2°C for a doubling of the CO2 content of the air (cf card n°1).
As said on cards n°1, n°6 and n°15, for an atmosphere in a gravitation field, the tropospheric lapse rate is dT/dz = - g/(Cp+ |Ch|)
where g=9,8 m/s2, Cp= 1005 J/kg , and Ch summarizes the effect of the heating of the air (1) by absorption of the solar infrared by
water vapour or liquid and (2) by the condensation of the water vapour. This is exactly equivalent to T(P)= Ttop (P/Ptop)R/(Cp+ |Ch|)
where R = 8,314 / 0,02896 = 287.There is no need of heat to "warm the surface" because its temperature is a consequence of the gravitation and of the mass of the
air, both on Earth and on Venus. The lapse rate (despite the temperature inversions near the surface at night and in the winter
polar regions) insures that the radiation of the air absorbed by the surface is slightly less than the radiation of the surface absorbed
by the air. Hence the air cannot warm the surface as the net balance is about zero or slightly positive from surface to air. 62The surface cools mostly by evaporation (order of magnitude 100 W/m2), by convection (20 to 30 /m2) and for about 20 W/m2 by
direct thermal infrared radiation reaching the cosmos after escaping absorption by water vapour and clouds.
Amazingly Poitou & Bréon state that "absorbing and emitting gases prevent the surface from losing some of the heat brought by the
sun"; they should have said that the radiative heat transfer surface to air is almost negligible and stay so for changes of the trace gas
content of the air around today's values.

Since some of the formatting of the formulas was lost in the WUWT post, the pdf link from the author and a pdf viewer is provided below: